“Ow!” I say, or mean to: it comes out as a moan.
“She said something!” the same voice cries, and I wince at how high it is. I start wriggling, trying to sit up.
Oh. I’m lying down. I didn’t even realize that, I was so spaced-out.…
Hands in my back help me sit up, holding me as I open my eyes. The first thing I see, blinking, is Luce, leaning forward, staring at me intently.
“Her pupils look fine,” she comments seriously. Holding up one finger, she asks: “Can you follow this, Scarlett?” as she moves it back and forth. I swivel my eyeballs obediently. Luce nods as she watches me.
“No concussion, Miss Carter,” Luce announces.
“Well, I didn’t think she’d be concussed,” Miss Carter says, sounding amused, “because she didn’t hit her head. But thank you—Lucy, is it? That was a very professional job of checking.”
“It’s from gymnastics,” Luce informs her. “Lots of girls crack their heads on the beams.”
I think I can sit up now without being held, and I turn my head to tell Taylor so. I get a real shock when I see that the person kneeling behind me, propping me up, is actually Alison. I start, my upper body jerking forward, away from her supporting hands, in a way that I realize, too late, could be misinterpreted. It’s as if I’m telling her I don’t want her to touch me.
Alison goes red and jumps to her feet. I start to mumble an explanation but it’s too late, and I’m still pretty dazed; I barely get a word out before she snaps:
“I caught you! You’d have smashed your head in if it wasn’t for me!”
My eyebrows shoot up so high it hurts. I look around for Taylor and see that she’s standing next to Miss Carter and Jane, talking urgently to them.
“Alison could have been hurt herself,” Luce adds coldly, pushing herself away from me and standing up too. “She did a whacking great jump to grab you before you went over face-first. You should thank her.”
“Thanks,” I start to say as best I can, but I don’t think anyone hears me. It’s very noisy up here with the wind whipping round us, snatching the words out of our mouths, and although I apparently didn’t hit my head, I still feel as dizzy as ever. I’m at eye level with everyone’s knees; they’re all standing around me, perched on the rock outcroppings like—well, a murder of crows. I get a flash of memory of what it’s like to be a child in a world of giant grown-ups.
Bizarrely, although this should make me feel vulnerable, I find it strangely reassuring. They’re all discussing how to take care of me; for once, looking out for myself isn’t a hundred percent my responsibility. I close my eyes so I can’t see Alison and Luce glaring at me, and wait for a few minutes, teeth chattering with the cold, till Taylor ducks down next to me and says:
“Okay, Scarlett. Me and Jane are going to help you back down to the bottom of the hill, and then we’ll find the coach and take you back to school to see the nurse and figure out what’s going on with you.”
She shoves one hand into my armpit and heaves me to my feet. I wobble dangerously, but Jane is right there on my other side, taking my elbow firmly.
“I’ll ring Gwen,” Miss Carter says, her phone in her hand. “She’s Scarlett’s aunt, after all. She’ll want to take Scarlett back to Fetters.”
I cast an agonized glance at Taylor.
“You come too!” I plead, and though my mouth still isn’t working very well she understands completely what I’m saying and nods repeatedly.
“I’m totally not leaving you alone with your aunt while you’re sick,” she reassured me. “Don’t worry.”
Jane shoots Taylor a frown, but doesn’t question this; she’s probably known Aunt Gwen long enough to guess that Aunt Gwen has the empathy and bedside manner of Hannibal Lecter.
“Does she have any allergies?” Jane asks Taylor as they start to walk me over to the cleft that’s the first descent we have to make.
“Nope,” Taylor says. “This is totally weird. I’ve never seen her like this before.”
Jane clears her throat.
“I know young people”—she starts—“um, sometimes experiment with things … like cough mixture, or cold medication.… Is there any possibility that she was doing something like that this morning? I’ll be discreet,” she adds quickly. “It’s just that the nurse should know if Scarlett’s on anything.”
“We’re not that dumb,” Taylor says flatly. “We’re not like that anyway, and we’re especially not dumb enough to do anything that would make us trippy before we come out to climb a mountain.”
I feel Jane nod beside me.
“Fine,” she says equably. “I know you’re both sporty girls. It makes sense that you’d respect your bodies and wouldn’t do something so stupid.”
Even in my debilitated state, I wince at being called sporty: it gives me an instant picture of Sharon Persaud, school hockey star, with her grim expression and enormous muscly thighs.
“Scarlett,” Taylor says to me, “we’re going to take you down this narrow bit now. Remember it when we came up? I’m going to go in front of you. I’ll have one hand out to brace you the whole time. Just take it super slowly and you’ll be fine.”
If anything, my dizziness is increasing, and I’m so busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, flat to the ground so I don’t trip, that I don’t lift my head to look around me. I register that two guys, whippet thin, pass us coming up; they’re actually running up the steep ascent, shiny and sweaty in tight black Lycra. For a moment I think I’m hallucinating, because they go by so fast, and my grip on Taylor tightens; then Jane says,
“Hill running is terribly hard on the knees,” and I relax in the knowledge that they’re real.
Miss Carter must have got hold of Aunt Gwen, because she’s waiting at the base of the stone steps cut into the hillside, her hands on her hips, eyes bulging furiously. The first words out of her mouth are:
“So she’s managed to get herself into trouble again! What on earth is it this time?”
I flinch back, cannoning into Jane. She says carefully:
“Miss Wakefield—Scarlett’s had some sort of a turn. She’s not well.”
“Really,” Aunt Gwen says disbelievingly.
“She’s just had a collapse,” Jane says slowly, as if she’s speaking to a child. “Did Clemency not tell you that when she rang you?”
Aunt Gwen shrugs.
“It’s one thing after another with Scarlett,” she mutters crossly. “I simply can’t keep up.”
I feel Jane take a deep breath.
“You know what?” she says overbrightly. “Taylor and I will take Scarlett back to Fetters. Sorry to have bothered you, Miss Wakefield. Come on, Scarlett. It’s not far now to the coach.”
Aunt Gwen turns away without saying another word, striding back down a deep grassy slope, presumably to rejoin the St. Tabby’s group. A pheasant’s hopping across the slope, a cock pheasant, his head bright green and red, his chestnut-colored body shiny and plump; he takes one look at Aunt Gwen stamping toward him and rises into the air, his wings whirring, getting out of her way as fast as he can.
“Uh, Scarlett and her aunt don’t get on too well,” Taylor says.
“Yes, I’m rather picking that up,” Jane mutters, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “Clemency, it’s me,” she says when her call’s answered. “I’m taking Scarlett back myself. Her aunt was, er—yes—yes—my God, she’s not exactly—yes, we’ll talk about this later. Let’s just say I think I should take Scarlett to the school nurse myself. Taylor McGovern will come with me. Can you get the other girls down all right? Those two—Alison and Lucy, is it?—seem very capable, I’m sure they’ll help—good—all right, darling, I’ll see you back at the school—my goodness, what a morning!”
I get to lie down on the backseat of the coach going back, and the warm upholstery and rumbling of the wheels lull me into a doze; Taylor has to shake me awake when we arrive at Fetters, and I uncurl my limbs from the happy ball I’ve
been snuggled in. To my embarrassment, I need to hold on to the tops of the seats for balance as I walk down the central aisle, and I’m unsteady going into the school building. All I want to do is sleep.
Jane and Taylor get me to the nurse’s office, and while we’re waiting for her to come back from wherever she is, I lie down on the narrow, green-plastic-upholstered examination table against the wall and pass out. I literally can’t keep my eyes open a moment longer. Not even the bright fluorescent light strips of the infirmary can stop me from going to sleep. I hear bustling around me. Someone prises open one of my eyelids and shines a light onto my eyeball, and I whine in protest. Fingers close around my wrist, taking my pulse. My sweater’s unzipped, my T-shirt pulled up, and the metal circle of a stethoscope is pressed to my bare chest; I whimper, because it’s cold, but soon it goes away, my clothes are pulled down again, and someone tucks a pillow under my head and a blanket around my body. The voices fade away, the lights go out. I turn my head in to the pillow and go out like the lights just did.
I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but when I eventually wake up, I’m cramped, my muscles tight and painful. I assume it’s because, in my sleep, I’ve been squashing myself up, automatically making sure I don’t turn over and fall off the high, narrow table. The paper covering of the pillow is damp where I’ve been drooling on it with an open mouth.
Nice, Scarlett. Very elegant. Embarrassed, I rip off the paper pillowcase, ball it up, and throw it into the wastebasket. I pull off the blanket and lever myself off the table, stretching as high as I can with both arms, working out the cramps in my muscles. Then I roll my head from side to side. I’m myself again. Any lingering wisps of drowsiness are fading away like mist in the dawn, burning off with the adrenaline that’s racing through me as I look back over the events of this morning and realize, with growing horror, that what happened to me was very bad indeed.
That wasn’t because I was getting my period. I know it now that I have my clarity back. And I would never even have assumed it was for two seconds, if I hadn’t been so trippy I could barely put one foot in front of the other.
Not only have I never felt anything like that before when my period’s nearly due, I’ve never heard of anyone getting a reaction like that just from being premenstrual. Feeling so weak, fainting … it’s like something out of a Charlotte Brontë novel. We’re doing Villette for English A-level, and the heroine spends half her time thinking she’s hallucinating visions of a nun who was murdered for having an affair, or wandering through the town completely spaced-out after the villainess has drugged her with opium.
As you can tell even from that short summary, it’s a brilliant book. A bit mad, but completely brilliant. But frankly, you read books precisely because you want to go through experiences in them that you’d run a mile from if you met them in real life. And though Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Villette, found herself walking through a carnival tripping on laudanum (which is actually a mix of opium and booze—the Victorians drank it to help them go to sleep. Mad, eh?), at least if you fall over at a carnival, you’ll probably just topple onto a nice patch of grass and maybe go to sleep.
Whereas I was up a very steep mountain with rocks in every direction. My faint could have had really serious consequences.
I’m shying away from the truth. Which is that it could have killed me.
Which makes twice in forty-eight hours that I could have died from a fall. And both times, it would have seemed like an accident.
I sit back down on the table, feeling very cold indeed. Sweat pools at the small of my back. I shiver as if someone’s dropped an ice cube down my shoulder blades. Even though, in the last year, a lot of truly awful things have happened to me, I’ve never been targeted like this. I’ve been caught up in other people’s drama, and it’s turned nasty and dangerous. But I’ve never been the intended victim. I’ve never felt that someone else had me in their sights.
I’ve never been this scared in my life.
The infirmary door opens and I jump almost off the table. Even when I see that it’s Taylor coming in, I don’t completely relax. And that’s an even worse shock, because in that split second, I’ve realized that I don’t quite trust anyone a hundred percent. Not even Taylor.
Taylor wasn’t there to catch me when I took that tumble earlier today. She’d gone off to get help from Miss Carter. And she did tell me to stay sitting down and to wait for her. But she called me up to a particularly steep place—by the sundial—and then she left me there.
“How’re you feeling?” she asks, shaking her hair out of her eyes, sitting down on the table next to me.
“Better,” I say. “Well”— I find myself qualifying that immediately—“I’m not feeling dizzy anymore. But now I’m freaking out about what happened to me.”
“You should,” Taylor says seriously. She hands me a mug of tea. “I made this for you. Lots of sugar. The nurse said I should wake you up and give you some tea.”
“Is she coming back in?” I ask, taking the mug gingerly, as it’s steaming.
Taylor makes a face.
“I don’t think so. I heard her telling Jane she thought you were exaggerating to get attention.”
“What?” I nearly drop the mug, I’m so cross.
“Yeah, Jane told her she was sure you weren’t, but then the nurse said something snarky about teenage girls thinking periods are an excuse for lots of drama, and she and Jane got into an argument.”
“I can see why she’s working in an all-boys’ school,” I say, blowing on my tea to cool it down. “The nurse, I mean.”
“Totally. But she said your vital signs were all fine when you came in here,” Taylor adds reassuringly. “Apparently your pulse was a bit fast, but that’s it.”
“It wasn’t the period thing, Taylor,” I say, looking at her directly. “I only thought that because—”
“Because anything else would have been way worse, and you didn’t want to go into a major panic up on top of a mountain,” Taylor finishes. “I didn’t think it was your period either. I mean, you’re never like that. You haven’t even got cramps yet this time around, have you?”
I shake my head and start to sip the tea. It’s strong enough to stand a spoon in and sweet enough to rot my teeth. Exactly what I need. After just a few sips I’m already feeling better.
“This isn’t a coincidence,” Taylor continues. “Not after that whole fire thing, and someone pushing you. Plus the note. Someone’s definitely out to get you.” She looks around the room, then gets up, closes the door, and comes back, pulling up the nurse’s chair so she can sit opposite me. “I think whatever it was, they put it in your water,” she says in a lowered voice. “I’ve been thinking about this nonstop since we got back here. All the water bottles had names on them. Plum and Susan carried them to the coach, and Lizzie got the keys. One of them could easily have tampered with your water bottle then. And after that, who knows if they gave the keys back to your aunt, right? They probably just left them in the lock and wandered off to check their makeup. And there’d have been plenty of time after we finished breakfast, before we set off for Arthur’s Seat, for someone else to go out to the coach and find your bottle and put something in it.…”
“Like what?” I ask, drinking more tea. The sugar’s picking me up, but my brain’s still not working as fast as usual. I’m perfectly happy to sit here and let Taylor run through the entire theory she’s been formulating while I was unconscious.
“Well, I’ve got an idea about that, too,” Taylor says, leaning forward. “Have you ever taken antihistamines? You don’t have any allergies, so probably not.”
I think this over, already halfway through the mug of tea. Eventually, I shake my head again.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, they can really knock you out,” Taylor says. “My brother took two of my mom’s Claritin once and he was zonked for hours. It was pretty funny, actually. He was like a zombie; he could barely keep his eyes open. Seth
totally hates being out of control—he doesn’t drink or anything, so I’d never seen him like that before. I said I was going to shave his eyebrows and he ran away and locked himself in his bedroom ’cause he was scared he’d pass out and I’d prank him.” She grins in reminiscence. “I wouldn’t have. But it was really funny to watch him sweat for once.”
“So you think—”
“I think that someone emptied out some capsules of antihistamines and dumped them into your water bottle,” she says. “That would be much easier than crushing up tablets, and you probably wouldn’t taste it so much. There’s powder in the capsules and it would dissolve in the water if they shook it up a bit. Did your water taste funny at all?”
I pull a face. “I don’t think so. But Edinburgh tap water tastes really different to London water anyway. We’ve all been saying so. There’s more fluoride or something.”
“Right.” Taylor nods slowly. “Makes sense. Anyway, it was a perfect opportunity. Antihistamines hit you pretty fast. Whoever did it would be hoping that you’d start feeling pretty woozy before long, and then if you took a fall, they’d be far away when it happened, and not be remotely blamed for it. Like, someone who was coming uphill really slowly, miles behind you.” She tilts her chair back a bit. “Or even someone in the St. Tabby’s group. Not on Arthur’s Seat at all.”
“So does that rule out Alison and Luce?” I say, thinking aloud. “Alison actually caught me when I was about to split my skull open.…”
“It could have been Luce,” Taylor says unhelpfully. “Or maybe Alison put the stuff in your water to give you a bad time, but freaked out when she saw that you might actually get killed.”
“No one who was worried about me actually getting killed would have pushed me over the staircase rail,” I point out.
“True,” Taylor agrees. “Scarlett, I’m really sorry I wasn’t there when you fell this morning, okay?” Nontactile, noncuddly Taylor actually tilts forward and puts a hand awkwardly on my knee for emphasis. “But I thought you’d stay sitting down till I came back for you,” she says, grimacing. “How was I supposed to know you’d be dumb and stubborn enough to try to walk down a cliff on your own?”
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